By Hank Segars

One
of our region’s most talented and unsung writers has to be Willie Morris
(1934-1999), a native of Yazoo City, Mississippi, who became the youngest
editor of Harper’s Magazine in 1967. Today, Morris is perhaps best known
for his ability to convey deep, innermost feelings about what it means to
be a southerner living outside the South.

A Phi
Beta Kappan at the University of Texas and a Rhode Scholar at Oxford,
England, Willie Morris wrote both fiction and nonfiction with heartfelt
emotion. His literary works are memorable and includes such diverse titles
as North TowardHome, The Last of the Southern Girls,
and The South Today: 100 Years After Appomattox. The
autobiographical My Dog Skip was released as a major motion picture
in 2000 and recalls the authentic South for those of us who have
bittersweet memories of country folk, rural living and, of all things . .
. family pets.

In 1980,
the author moved from New York City to his beloved homeland to become
writer-in-residence at the University of Mississippi. During this time he
continued to produce extraordinary prose and released a number of
bestsellers to include The Courting of Marcus Dupree, My Two
Oxfords, and Terrains of the Heart and Other Essays on Home.

Willie
Morris, an outspoken advocate of the downtrodden, passed away in 1999 at
the age of sixty-four. Ironically, he remains as the only author to lie in
state in the Rotunda of the Old Capitol in Jackson, Mississippi and his
well-chosen words continue to haunt us—especially when he says things
like:

I passionately believe that there is an
ineluctable continuity to Southern experience that still exits; I see it
everywhere. It is a matter of the stories passed along, of the music and
the speech, of knowing who lives in such-and-such house and who lived
there before, and where the wisteria grows best and the robin eats her
first crocus.” (From one of Morris’s finest articles entitled “Is There a
South Anymore?”)

My first
(and favorite) encounter with Willie Morris was the discovery of a
coffee-table sized book tagged with an intriguing title: A Southern
Album: Recollections of Some People and Places and Times Gone By. This
volume of exquisite photographs was first published in 1975 by Oxmoor
House of Birmingham, Alabama with Irwin Glusker serving as editor and the
irrepressible Morris as writer of the narrative. The pictures (as we say
down heah-ah) are nothing short of startling graphics, in both black and
white and color. The photographs are southerners in their natural habitat
with captions like “Wedding group,” “River baptism,” “Four generations of
a Louisville family,” and “Olympia Brass Marching Band, New Orleans.”

A Southern Album contains memorable scenes of
clapboard churches, cotton fields, country roads, tenant farmers, and
smiling children. Scattered throughout are historical imprints of notable
personalities to include Sam Ervin, Will Rogers, Clarence Darrow, Huey
Long, Lyndon Johnson, and Tallulah Bankhead. And there are pictures with
Georgia connections: “Ty Cobb stealing third base,” “Bobby Jones on the
first fairway at Pebble Beach,” “Franklin Roosevelt fishing at Warm
Springs,” “Wagon wheels in Madison,” “Caretakers among the Union
tombstones at Andersonville,” and “The Apalachee River.”

Like a
lost treasure, this brilliant collection of images is no longer in print.
Nevertheless, copies of A Southern Album can still be found in
local libraries, at antiquarian book stores, and on the web pages of major
booksellers (for example, see the Barnes and Nobles web site for their
“used books” page). Locating your own copy will be a view of the
unvarnished South and an introduction to one of Mississippi’s—and
America’s—greatest writers, Willie Morris.

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